In many industrial environments, manufacturing processes have become automated and industrial efficiency has risen substantially in recent years. While efficiency is important in generating a product and meeting consumer demand, safety is also an important aspect of industrial design. Many safety features have been implemented in attempts to minimize injury to operators and/or other personnel in an industrial environment, such as a factory or manufacturing plant. For instance, emergency shut-off systems can be brightly colored and positioned at points of easy access to permit an operator to shut down a dangerous machine in the event of an accident. However, such systems are typically only employed when it is too late, such as after an accident.
Other safety devices are designed to facilitate providing a safe manufacturing environment are directed toward shutting down hazardous movement or conditions before an accident happens. For instance, one such safety device is a safety light curtain that can be utilized to prevent injury by detecting an interruption of one or more light beams comprising the light curtain. In this manner, object detection can be achieved based on interrupted light beams, and can be performed at varying levels of sensitivity. For instance, light beams can be designed and/or set to detect an object the size of a finger, a hand, a limb, etc., depending on a particular application associated with the device from which the light curtain is intended to protect a human operator. Typical light curtains comprise a plurality of emitters and receivers, where each respective emitter-receiver pair must be critically aligned in order to ensure proper operation. For instance, an emitter and receiver must be aligned to ensure that emitted light is received by a corresponding receiver when there is no obstruction in the path of the light beam. If the emitter and receiver fall out of alignment, a false alarm condition can be generated (e.g., the light curtain will register an obstruction because the expected light beam is not received at the receiver.
Conventional light curtain systems that employ numerous emitter-receiver pairs can thus be costly to maintain with regard to both time and money. Ensuring that each and every emitter-receiver pair in the light curtain is critically aligned can require substantial time investment, resulting in increased machine down-time during maintenance and reduced productivity. Thus, there is a need in the art for systems and/or methods that overcome such deficiencies.